[MD] Social Imposition ?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[David M]
Is there a question here about what can be a source of DQ? I 
understand individuals can be a source of DQ, so do collectives only 
preserve & accumulate SQ?

[Arlo]
The misconception here arises from isolating "individuals" and 
"collectives". An individual inorganic pattern is capable of 
responding to DQ, but not in the same way an individual biological 
pattern is capable. An atom has a very limited repertoire of 
responses, but when they do follow DQ into collectivizing as "cells" 
those emergent patterns (individual biological patterns) have a 
drastically increased repertoire of responses. But then you see cells 
follow DQ and collectively form bodies and that "individual body" (a 
collective of individual cells) has a still greater repertoire of responses.

So the answer is both yes and no, individuals (which emerge from 
collectives) respond to DQ through the repertoire of choices they 
have. Evolutionarily, the movement has been towards creating "more 
advanced individual patterns" (again, by virtue of collectivization) 
that can respond to DQ with greater choice than the individual 
patterns of which they are composed. In this, everything is BOTH an 
individual AND a collective. This is why the dichotomy is so 
fallacious and misleading. Collectives are a source of DQ, your body 
is a collective and it is capable of responding to biological 
quality. But here we call your "body" an "individual" precisely 
because the collective activity of those cells has given emergence to 
a pattern that functions as a single unit when viewed from a higher 
level of analysis, and on that level of analysis can respond with 
greater repertoire to DQ than is possible by the individual patterns 
we call "cells" (which are really collectives as well, we only think 
of them as "individuals" for the same reason, that the collective 
activity of the cells components has given emergence to a pattern 
that functions as a single unit when viewed from a higher level of 
analysis, and on that level of analysis can respond with greater 
repertoire to DQ than is possible by the individual patterns that 
make up the cell.)